Sweeney Todd
On March 1, 1979, Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber of Fleet Street premiered
on Broadway and precipitated all-out war.
Coming as it did from composer/lyricist Stephen Sondheim and director
Harold Prince, the show should not have shocked as many people as it first
did. After all, Prince and Sondheim had been redefining the established
ideas about musical theater since their first collaboration in 1970: that
show was Company, and it very carefully and deliberately trampled on every
convention of what had been called (until then) American musical comedy.
With its plotless, non-linear construction; its abstract, constructivist
unit set; its abrasive, urban score; its barbed, neurotic lyrics; and its
ensemble cast consisting of an ambivalent bachelor anti-hero and five
married couples who in their duality functioned almost as a single
character each, Company was revisionist in every conceivable way.
Company was soon followed by a string of astonishing Prince/Sondheim
collaborations: Follies (1971), A Little Night Music (1973), Pacific
Overtures (1976), Sweeney Todd (1979), and Merrily We Roll Along (1981), a
16-performance Broadway flop that led to the breakup of the Prince/Sondheim
collaboration; but in going their separate ways they have continued to
challenge old shopworn notions about the nature of musical theater: Prince
went on to direct such landmarks as Evita (1980); Willie Stark (1981) for
the Houston Grand Opera; two productions of Candide (1974 and 1982), once
in an experimental staging for the Brooklyn Academy of Music and then for
the New York City Opera; Sweeney Todd (1984) for the New York City Opera;
productions of two Puccini operas (Madama Butterfly and The Girl of the
Golden West) for Lyric Opera of Chicago; The Phantom of the Opera (1987);
the hallucinatory, homoerotic Kiss of the Spider Woman (1993); and a
controversial new production of Show Boat in Toronto (1993). Sondheim has
since gone on to establish a fruitful relationship with playwright and
director James Lapine: with Lapine he created Sunday in the Park with
George (1984 Pulitzer Prize), a complex meditation on the creative process
which uses pointillist painter Georges Seurat's life and work as its
inspiration; Into the Woods (1987), a revisionist study of family
relationships using well-known characters from the tales of the Brothers
Grimm; and Passion (1994), a hypnotic, erotic, and rhapsodic chamber opera
which examines love, sex, and beauty in nineteenth-century Italy. In 1991,
with playwright John Weidman and Playwrights Horizons, he created what has
proven to be his most controversial work to date: Assassins is a
disturbingly funny and politically provocative vaudeville which swirls
American classical music and history into a nightmare vision of the dark
side of the American Dream.
All of the shows in this long catalogue have been, in one way or another,
further developments of the form of musical theater: Prince is a director
who delights in scenic abstraction, framing devices, deep focus, juxtaposed
theatrical modes (such as Broadway musical and Kabuki), and dark subject
matter; Sondheim composes rhythmic, dissonant, densely layered music
heavily influenced by nineteenth and early twentieth century composers
(particularly Ravel) and by American popular song forms, and he writes
witty, often sarcastic, always poetic lyrics that embrace such distinct
forms as showtunes, patter, pop, ballad, folk, free verse, and haiku.
Why, then, should a work like Sweeney Todd meet with such initial critical
and popular hostility? Partly, I think, because of its pivotal position in
the Sondheim canon, and partly because of its subject: it is based on an
obscure nineteenth century British melodrama (which in turn was based on an
even older British folk legend) about a deranged barber who cuts the
throats of his customers and then has them served up as meat pies baked by
his accomplice Mrs. Lovett. When the show began previews, hoardes of
unprepared theatergoers stampeded for the exits, unaware that cannibalism
was on the evening's menu; and Prince's Brechtian conception hardly helped
matters, involving as it did the full frontal-viewed throat cuttings and an
elaborate mise-en-scene that placed the action firmly within the
dehumanizing context of the Industrial Revolution. Sondheim's music is his
most Romantic and, conversely, his most disturbing: it includes a
gang-rape conducted against a cheerfully dissonant minuet, a hilarious (and
now quite famous) duet about cannibalism, a complicated ensemble scene
which has the denizens of Fleet Street greedily gorging on Mrs. Lovett's
human pies, and a difficult and disturbing scene that combines
self-flagellation, geriatric lust, masturbation, and puritanical guilt
which was so controversial that it was cut from the original production.
Like most of Sondheim's work, Sweeney Todd is extremely schizophrenic. It
tells its story through a unique blend of theatrical, musical, and literary
modes, including Brecht's Epic theater, Jacobean tragedy, music hall
burlesque, nineteenth century European fairy tales, Victorian operetta, the
social commentary of Charles Dickens, American Expressionism by way of
Orson Welles, the film music of Bernard Herrmann, and modernist opera by
way of Benjamin Britten, Kurt Weill, and Alban Berg. This is, to say the
least, quiet a mixed bag, but it neatly characterizes the ambivalent nature
of the play and of Sondheim's work in general, which usually balances
itself within a morally ambiguous context. Philosophically, the play owes
its presentation to at least two ethical perspectives: egoist (Hobbes) and
nihilist (Nietschze). The moral and ethical dilemmas of the play are
expressed partly in its very conception and presentation, and partly in the
situations into which it forces its characters.
To speak of the criteria for ethical decisions in the case of the character
of Sweeney Todd seems a rather odd statement, since he does not seem to be
acting out of any sort of ethical philosophy, but a close examination of
his motives reveals a definite Hobbesian world-view:
(Sweeney Todd, 91-2)
(99)
The juxtaposition of "Epiphany" and "A Little Priest" carefully reflects
the central conflict of the production: the first piece is neurotic,
skittish, as mad as the character, a deafening Hitchcockian explosion; the
second is also mad, but it takes the form of a joyous Viennese waltz (one
of the composer's favorite musical forms), and like the character of Mrs.
Lovett it has a definite lilt. Indeed, it may be said that the central
relationship of the play (Todd and Mrs. Lovett) neatly characterizes the
moral ambiguity which is so typical of Sondheim. Todd is the honest man
driven mad by grief and his overwhelming desire for revenge, Mrs. Lovett
the amoral businesswoman driven mad by capitalist lust. It is she who
concocts the popping-people-into-pies venture which proves so profitable,
and it is in her character that the Hobbesian perspective of the play
becomes most evident: she is Capitalism run rampant, a bizarre music hall
combination of Lady Macbeth and Mother Courage whose dream is to live:
(130)
(126)
Todd is the complete antithesis of Mrs. Lovett: solemn, gloomy, obsessive,
brooding, intense, he is everything that the giddy, talkative, cheerful
Mrs. Lovett is not. Unlike Mrs. Lovett, who is driven by capitalist greed
plain and simple, Todd has deeper, much more personal motivations: he
wants to revenge himself on Judge Turpin and Beadle Bamford, who had had
him imprisoned on a trumped-up charge, then raped his wife and (he
believes) drove her to suicide; it is only this which drives him to murder.
It is not until the Judge slips from his grasp that Todd really cracks,
vowing that he will "practice on less honorable throats" (88) until he gets
another chance at the Judge. In his rage he adopts the existentialist view
that God is dead; worse, he comes to believe that God is on his side:
(94-5)
(87)
When does it become too much? Clearly, Todd seems to put no limits on the
extent to which his obsession can rule him; and yet his motivations are not
so obviously egoist as Mrs. Lovett's. Todd's situation calls into question
the very nature of justice: Todd, a working-class citizen, was unjustly
sent to prison, his wife raped, and his daughter committed to an insane
asylum, all by Judge Turpin, the representative of justice and law. One of
the questions which ethics poses is what, precisely, constitutes justice?
In exchanging Judge Turpin's brand of "justice" for his own, does not Todd
put himself on the same level as the Judge? And what of Mrs. Lovett? Does
she deserve her fate, or is Hobbes right in saying that the true state of
nature is a state of war and that Mrs. Lovett is behaving as she must?
These questions become even more complicated when we see that the
presentation of Judge Turpin is, to a certain degree, as morally equivocal
as that of Todd and Mrs. Lovett. This is revealed in a controversial scene
which was cut from the original production because of its explicit nature:
as the Judge kneels and peers through a keyhole at Todd's daughter Johanna,
he flays himself into a frenzy of Puritanical shame, pleading with God to
purify him. His cry of "God! Deliver me!" becomes a refrain as the whip
lashes grow more forceful. Shame, lust, pain, and pleasure mingle. The
song has an unpleasant ambience of perverse sexuality and sacrilege, as the
orchestra writhes and pants a decadent Ravellian waltz and the Judge
continues his sado-masochistic flogging, until, at the very climax of the
song, as the melodic fragments of Johanna's and Lucy's themes mingle
(mother and daughter becoming much the same person in his own mind), the
Judge has an orgasm.
In this powerful scene, the Judge reveals the extent of his own guilt. He
cries for God and Johanna to deliver him, asks God to "release," "forgive,"
"restrain," "pervade" him, calls for the "filth" to "leave" him (179-80),
and yet at the same time seeks to relieve his building sexual tension. He
seems to be aware of his own sinfulness, but can do nothing to escape it.
The violent confusion of prayer and masturbation in the music and staging
mirrors the Judge's own personal difficulty in reconciling his spiritual
fervor and his sexual needs. Johanna is depicted as an archetypal Virgin,
a pale vision of innocence and purity with blinding golden hair who is
first seen at her second-floor window singing of her loneliness, her
despair, and her desire for freedom. She is Rapunzel to the Judge's Witch,
and she represents the pure ideal for which the Judge reaches but which he
can never seem to grasp, and so he must possess her in the only way he
knows how. His desires and his actions are cruel and blasphemous and
completely at odds with his obligations as a dispenser of justice, and
somewhere he seems to know it, and he hates himself for it.
This is a distinct contrast to Mrs. Lovett, who is not even aware that what
she is doing is wrong; for it is the very notions of right and wrong that
are at issue here. Todd believes he is right in looking to revenge himself
on the Judge, and we are inclined to agree with him; Mrs. Lovett clearly
sees herself as a moral person (she often speaks of her maternal nature);
and, were it not for the flagellation scene, the Judge, too, could be said
to see himself as behaving morally. Yet the scene exists (and was
subsequently reinstated into the show), and its existence effectively
complicates the Judge's character and his motives: he is much less the
stock villain of melodrama and more a pitiful representative of fallen man
trying to regain the ideal he had forsaken (very much what Todd himself is
in danger of becoming). The fundamental question of the musical remains
who is right and who is wrong?
Quite likely it is a question without an answer. The very structure and
execution of the play reflect this central conflict. Sondheim sets up an
abrasion between melody and lyrics and their dramatic context that
forcefully points up the work's schizophrenic tone: the entire show pivots
upon the distinct split between comedy and tragedy represented by the
characters of Todd and Mrs. Lovett (so much so that the show ends up having
a faintly Absurdist flavor), and so Sondheim's approach to each character's
music was designed to reflect that dichotomy. In addition, there are
scenes in which the music works in direct opposition to the staging: in
Act II, there is a scene in which Todd sings--to a gorgeous, lyrical,
serene melody -- of his love for his daughter; as he sings, he slashes the
throats of the various customers who come through his shop. There is a
similar moment when Mrs. Lovett calls for her young assistant Toby, who has
discovered the ghastly secret of the meat-pies. She sings:
(157-8)
This conflict between content and context effectively characterizes the
moral ambiguity represented by the central characters. The overwhelming
philosophy of the work is Hobbesian, but we can also see Nietschze in
statements such as,
It is a sentiment which is not unfamiliar to Sondheim: Company, Follies, A
Little Night Music, Pacific Overtures, Merrily We Roll Along, and Assassins
have all been criticized for their cynicism, their uncompromising
presentation of disillusionment (be it marital, professional, sexual,
personal, political, or ethical) among the middle classes. Sondheim's view
of the world is depressingly bleak. The two shows sandwiched between
Merrily and Assassins described a definite upward arc toward a more
optimistic philosophy; and yet he will not -- perhaps cannot -- let go of
his bleak world view. Both Sunday in the Park with George and Into the
Woods present complex ethical questions that do not have easy answers (even
as they present a much more optimistic conclusion than I think is
comfortable for Sondheim), while Assassins heralded a full return to the
familiar Sondheim themes of lost innocence and the death of the American
Dream, and Passion is as uncompromising in its depiction of the destructive
nature of obsession as Sweeney Todd. It is perhaps this very contradiction
(between the bleakly cynical and the idealistically optimistic) which gives
Sondheim's work its vitality, a vitality born out of the abrasion created
between his chosen form (the musical) and his choice of subject matter,
which are not typical of either musicals or operas. Sondheim chooses to
address ethical questions (such as the morality of marriage and family, the
price of Imperialism, the costs of professional success and capitalism, the
nature of justice and truth, the conflict between art and commerce, the
accountability of the individual to the higher truths of community, and the
loss of innocence both personal and national) within a format that is more
accustomed to trivializing them. In Sweeney Todd he creates a world which
is strongly Hobbesian in its outlook, with echoes of the nihilism of
Nietschze and the existentialism of Kierkegaard and others (like Sartre and
Beckett). The powerful conceptual references to Brecht help to delineate
further the ethical questions posed by the play: Brecht's view of the
world was itself distinctly Hobbesian. What is significant about Sondheim
is that he in no way condones the egoist philosophy; rather, his work,
while acknowledging the truth of Hobbes' observations, seeks to change it.
What makes his work so effective (like Brecht's) is that it uses an
established popular format to stare middle class America right in the eye,
and spit into it.
Some Ethical Perspectives
by Anthony DiSanto
For what's the sound of the world out there?...
Those crunching noises pervading the air...
It's man devouring man, my dear
And who are we to deny it in here?"
The moment comes precisely at the apex of the musical, immediately following
Todd's famous mad-scene near the end of Act I (in which he articulates, in
a harrowing aria called "Epiphany," the motivations which turn him into a
mass murderer), and just preceding the "Little Priest" waltz which brings
down the curtain. The latter is an outrageous duet for Todd and Mrs.
Lovett in which they joyfully lose themselves in their macabre world by
imagining the various flavors of the anticipated meat-pies:
It's fop.
In the shop.
And we have some shepherd's pie peppered
With actual shepherd
On top.
And I've just begun.
Here's a politician -- so oily
It's served with a doily --
Have one.
By the sea, in our nest
We could share our kippers
With the odd paying guest
From the weekend trippers,
Have a nice sunny suite
For the guest to rest in --
Now and then, you could do the guest in --
By the sea...
Her criteria for behavior has nothing to do with ethics
or morality; her response to the traditional ethical question, "What ought
I to do?" would very probably be something along the lines of "Whatever
protects my own interests." Her motives for helping Todd in his revenge
plot are distinctly selfish: she acts out of greed, a desire to put her
competition (her neighbor Mrs. Mooney, whose secret ingredient is cats) out
of business, and, she says, a profound love for Todd. That so-called love
is actually her wish for a secure bourgeoise retirement with all the
trimmings, namely a cottage by the sea and Todd by her side. When Todd
loses himself in his obsessive brooding over his revenge, Mrs. Lovett
chides him:
We got a nice respectable business now, money coming regular --
And since we're careful to pick and choose --
Only strangers and such like wot won't be missed --
Who's going to catch on?
Mrs. Lovett is without question the Hobbesian heart of the show; indeed,
she is Hobbes taken beyond extremes, since she has nothing to control her
except how many customers come through Todd's barber shop. In Prince's
original conception of her (and in Angela Lansbury's brilliant and daring
portrayal), she was loveably, but unmistakably, evil, a "cannibalistic
capitalist [who] deserves her final push into the oven nearly as much as
does the witch in Hansel and Gretel" (Frank Rich, "Feminist Message,"
C15). She is the perfect embodiment of Hobbes' notion of existence being a
state of war: Mrs. Lovett is at war with everyone, from Mrs. Mooney, to
the corrupt Judge Turpin and his equally corrupt flunky Beadle Bamford, to
the mad and disheveled Beggar Woman who flits about the outskirts of the
action and proves to be the greatest threat to Mrs. Lovett's secure
position in Todd's affections, namely his wife Lucy, whom Mrs. Lovett had
led him to believe was long dead. She is Iago to Todd's Othello, Lady
Macbeth to his Macbeth, orchestrating his fall and assuring her own in the
process. Her tragic flaw is ambition: she is as obsessively ambitious as
Todd is obsessively vengeful, and that is her downfall.
The history of the world, my love...
Is those below serving those up above...
How gratifying for once to know
That those above will serve those down below
Todd is one of four characters in the play who can
actually be called virtuous, and his transformation into psychotic killer
is born out of his intense rage: he had been a quiet, hardworking family
man whose life was destroyed by the cruelty and lust of Judge Turpin, and
so his rage is tempered by a hopeless, distinctly existentialist anguish:
The lives of the wicked should be
Made brief.
For the rest of us, death
Will be a relief..."
The pure, unspotted, selfless love of Todd for wife and daughter is contrasted
with the cruel, selfish, sinful lust of Judge Turpin for sheer physical
pleasure.
Where are you hiding?
Nothing's gonna harm you,
Darling...
Not while I'm around...
Demons are prowling everywhere,
Nowadays...
The music
is sweet and melodious, almost a lullaby, but it is an exact reprise of
sentiments Toby had sung to her earlier in expressing his love and devotion
to her (Toby is the show's most prominent symbol of corrupted innocence);
here, the situation and the underscoring (a scale descending crazily under
the sweet melody) make the song dissonant. The most conventional love song
in the show is not sung to a lover, but by Todd to his beloved razors.
Todd and the Judge sing rapturously of "Pretty Women" as Todd prepares to
cut the Judge's throat. In the play's climactic scene, Todd discovers that
the Beggar Woman he has just murdered is in fact his lost wife Lucy; he
sings of his loss in big 8/4 bars that sound like a funeral march, while
Mrs. Lovett twitters away in waltz time.
There's a hole in the world
Like a great black pit
And the vermin of the world
Inhabit it
And its morals aren't worth
What a pig could spit
And it goes by the name of London.
At the top of the hole
Sit the privileged few,
Making mock of the vermin
In the lower zoo,
Turning beauty into filth